Friday
The vibrations of a huge samba band rouse me reluctantly from my slumber. They are the Carnival Collective and they are going to be our early morning (about 10-11am) wake up call for the weekend. Sure, they're a great band and I go to watch their set after my nice cooked breakfast, but WHO want's to be woken up by samba? The rest of the crew seem to agree as we grumpily struggle for coffee in our kitchen tent.
As the morning rain clears we escape the sunshine (what fools!) into a tiny tent to watch a hilarious Italian chef juggle various implements, including the obligatory rubber chicken. It is still sunny when we reach the Pyramid Stage, as Gogol Bordello kick off, but they soon herald the first huge downpour of Friday with some crazy Mano Negra style Latino punk. It's a good fun show, but the rain REALLY comes down. I wrap my camera in two plastic bags to keep it safe from the rain and endure the soaking.
At the Bandstand, Bill Smarme is playing with his band, a mixture of feelgood hillbilly country and blues. They sing to the rain and the mud and us poor sould standing in it. The audience thins as the rain picks up and there are only about eight of us left when Rose Kemp starts.
The set is marred not only by the rain, but one of the nearby stalls begins to blast out drum and bass just as I'm about to comment on how good they are at turning off their music for the little bandstand. Rose sings three songs a capella then gets off the stage as soon as she can. It is here that I discover that simply shoving my camera inside two Tescos bags is not enough and that it is somewhat broken. On the way to see Chumbawamba it goes through varying stages of brokenness, finally settling on the preview screen not working at all. We stop to watch a man swallow a sword.
Chumbawamba are surprisingly good, four-part harmony old English folk songs mixed with similar arrangements of some of their classic songs. The anarchists have grown old gracefully it seems, looking more like 70s Abba than anarchist punks.
Another gypsy band follows in the Avalon tent, Oi Va Voi who are more pop than punk, a kind of weird mixture of soul funk reggae and gypsy music. It's well received and pretty danceable. My mate was told to see The Cat Empire, so we wait for a bit but they seem to be really late and I can't hang around any longer because I have to rush off to see Toumani Diabate and the Symmetric Orchestra on the Jazz World stage.
Performance of the weekend. I know this as it happens, there will be nothing as good as this. The Allstars are from all over Africa and they all seem to revere Toumani Diabate, the performance being that they take it in turns to sit with the master and have lessons in musicianship. At the end of the quite frankly phenomenal performance, they all queue up to shake the great man's hand before leaving the stage. Incredible.
After a tasty dinner back at camp we settle into the evening's work. Bizarre dance group Zoid Productions perform second to last on the stage and I only get to see their freaky outfits from a distance. Before the fire show we have a 'performance' from the Festival Fire Swingers who are basically a bunch of random people who swing fire about a lot. Tonight they are accompanied by a sort of samba band that plays on bins and shopping trolleys and the like. Our job is to put them out if they catch fire, but it's tempting to run around with the extinguisher spraying each club and poi innocently shouting lookout! Fire!. The end of the show is a little performance by fire swinging group Solar, who have a few routines that look pretty.
I don't know, maybe we get de-sensitised to mere fire jugglers when there is so much other exciting stuff to be had. A couple of them are really good though and the fire whips look cool. There is a huge fire-breathing dragon up in the corner of the field that keeps eveyone entertained while waiting for the big show.
I am stationed in the middle at the front. This is a 'safe' six metres from the front rail and array of jets and hoses. There is some nervous shuffling as the girl who was there on Thursday said it was too hot and nobody really wanted to be that close. So I sort of end up there by default, ie I didn't pick anywhere else quickly enough. There is a girl standing next to me, right in front of the only six people in the crowd who are sitting down and she refuses to move, gets quite shirty when I ask and insists that she has been 'told' to stand exactly there, otherwise her film won't come out right. She ignores me when I point out that if it has to be that perfect, she isn't ACTUALLY standing right in the middle at all.
Five minutes into Eddie Egal's Pyromancer show and I'm watching the huge gas canisters under the front of the stage when there is a loud pop and the hoses start flapping about like crazy. The hiss of escaping gas is deafening and I'm standing there in my bright orange tabard with FIRE STEWARD written on it and a crowd of innocent punters behind me. The show hasn't really got going yet, we've had the big flames to start it off, but it's mainly water everywhere and the big crab thing is doing her dance. My mind races. I know I'm supposed to run up there and switch off the gas before something blows up but all I can think it what if it blows up?! There's six huge canisters there, if one goes, they all go. I'm frantically looking for one of the guys backstage (nonchalantly having a bit of a smoke) when their cameraman runs up and saves the day. So tonight's show has no brilliant display from the front, but it still has quite an impact.
Oh! The stories we tell around the fire! The drinking that commences after that shake-up! The weather has been fairly on and off today, maybe it's not going to be that bad after all.
